As Bradley Cooper prepares to release his biopic of the great American composer and conductor, it’s time to celebrate again the sartorial style of Leonard Bernstein
This is how Tom Wolfe described Leonard Bernstein in “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, a famous New York magazine story from 1970: “Lenny is wearing a black turtleneck, navy blazer, Black Watch plaid trousers and a necklace with a pendant hanging down to his sternum. His tailor comes here to the apartment to take the measurements and do the fittings. Lenny is a short, trim man, and yet he always seems tall. It is his head. He has a noble head, with a face that is at once sensitive and rugged, and a full stand of iron-gray hair, with sideburns, all set off nicely by the Chinese yellow of the room. His success radiates from his eyes and his smile with a charm that illustrates Lord Jersey’s adage that ‘contrary to what the Methodists tell us, money and success are good for the soul.’”
As so often, Wolfe, himself no slouch in the sartorial stakes, was right. Even in middle age, Bernstein — prodigiously talented writer of symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre scores, choral works, opera, chamber music, and pieces for the piano — was a finelooking specimen of mid-century masculinity. Great hair, seductive, gun-dog eyes, a way with a cigarette. And, as Bradley Cooper demonstrates in Maestro, his new magnum opus on Bernstein’s life, Lenny did love a polo-neck (“turtlenecks”, as the Americans insist on calling them). Archive images of the great man at both work and play suggest a wardrobe of multiple roll-necks in many hues and knits, worn either solo, with slacks, or, jazz style, under a jacket.
Bernstein, both classicist and pop-culture icon, wore his polo-neck as a non-conformist statement of difference — cognisant that this beatnik apparel was considered unconventional, especially amongst his tuxedo-and-tail-coatwearing, baton-wielding peers. Not just any casual sweater, but also very much not a starched shirt and bow tie.
Perhaps taking sartorial cues from his pals in the Black Panthers (Wolfe’s New York story was about a party Bernstein threw for the Panthers), who had adopted the dark polo-neck as part of their uniform, Bernstein played the part of the well-dressed rebel, employing the services of both a Jewish tailor and an English dresser.
(“Think Yiddish, dress Briddish,” as they used to say on Madison Avenue.)
East 64th Street’s Otto Perl had survived the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Da
